Can Sarah Palin beat President Obama in 2012?

Regardless of whether Sarah Palin runs or not here is where President Obama stands:

1)Only 40% of the electorate feel that Obama deserves to be re-elected while over 50% would vote for a generic GOP nominee or someone else.

2)Yet any re-election campaign has been proven to be a referendum on the job performance of the incumbent regardless of who it is. Obama will be no different. The question is not whether Palin or anyone can beat Obama in 2012 but whether the American people will permit Obama to have "one more kick at the can" or not.

3)President Obama according to the Quinnpiac poll released yesterday and also the exit polls on November 2nd can only command about 37% of the WHITE vote. On November 2nd the GOP garnered 60% of it. If the GOP can duplicate that in 2012 Obama will be toast regardless who the GOP nominee is and regardless of increased minority turnout in 2012. Obama will not win re-election unless he gets the WHITE vote over 40% again. He received 43% of it in 2008 to McCain's 55%. Many folks forget in a two party system a zero-sum game exists. This is exactly how it played out in 2010. Oh by the way the Gallup weekly summary of last week had Obama's job approval with WHITES at 33%.

4)And this leads to the bold suggestion if the current lay of the political landscape stays the way it is now over the next two years, the only way Obama can win re-election is if the WHITE vote is split among a viable 3rd party alternative regardless if the GOP nominee is Palin or someone else. Of course his numbers may improve, but objectively Obama, unlike Bill Clinton is a unapologetic ideologue who is not going to pivot to the center (George Soros won't let him) and thus his standing among the American electorate is not going to change all that much over the next two years because of his radical agenda.

5)The 2010 election proves again that the GOP is dominant again in both the South and the midwest, the core of where George W Bush won in 2000 and 2004 and comprised of many red states and states with high populations of evangelicals in relation to the entire electorate. Look at the top 4 candidates for the GOP nomination, who is most likely to play the best in this region of the country. Certainly not Romney. So that leaves Palin, Newt and Huck. Did you know up to and including Super Tuesday in 2008, Huckabee only received 8% of the votes on non-evangelicals based on a weighted average. The question that is rarely asked is how well does Huck play outside his evangelical base? Based on this finding not very well. As for Newt notice in polls done by PPP the tremendous gender gap he has where FEMALE voters have shied away from the former Speaker of the House and many more MALES embrace him. How would that play out in a general election where Obama does far better with FEMALE voters? As for Palin check out the PPP state polls and you will find in over 2/3 of them that a gender gap of +5 in terms of males over females does not exist, that Palin is actually pretty balanced with her support, which of course the MSM would have you believe that she is "poison" or an anathema to FEMALE voters. And Palin is extremely popular with evangelical and social conservative voters in the South and midwest.

6)Along with #5 the midterm result portends that the GOP will have a great chance to recapture the battleground states it lost in the 2008 presidential election: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio. As of now that's 86 electoral votes. Add that to the 173 McCain got and subtract 86 from the 365 Obama got you get 259 for the GOP nominee and 279 for Obama.

Here's the deal: Obama is losing Jewish supporters-the Dems only got 66% of the Jewish vote in 2010 down from 78% in 2008. Much of this loss of support was in Florida. In addition Jews for Sarah is a web site that advocates for Sarah Palin. As for the other 4 states, Palin managed to convince WHITE voters to turn out en masse in 2012; with two more years of Obama and Palin, if she gets the nomination, in the Messiah's face can you really objectively envision a scenario where WHITES will gravitate to the Messiah as they did in 2008. Imho, not after they voted en masse (60%) to reject the Obama agenda in 2010.

7)Right now the MSM is attempting to concoct polls that show that Sarah Palin is far less popular than she was before the election. Now use your God-given brains. The TPM and Sarah Palin were highly instrumental in the GOP regaining the House and adding seats in the Senate and doing better in any election since 1938 with Palin being shown by Rasmussen in September and AP-GfK in October among Likely voters to have favorables/unfavorables of 48/49 and 49/50 respectively and coming off a major political triumph the American electorate is throwing Palin under the bus. I'm not buying that for one second.

8)By the way, did you catch the last batch of 18 state polls recently released by PPP? Palin now leads Romney and others in blue states like Maine, Wisconsin and Washington state, in the purple state of Ohio and the red states of Texas and West Virginia. Although Palin is behind Romney by 6 points in Florida she leads Mitt among conservatives 27% to 25% and among independents 32% to 11%. Why is there not more focus on the viability of Mitt Romney?

9)Having said all of that if the economy dramatically improves Obama will probably be re-elected regardless if Palin is the nominee. What many pundits don't want to admit about presidential elections is that often the challenger has little to say whether the incumbent will be re-elected that external forces have a lot more to do with the eventual outcome when a sitting POTUS asks the American people for another stamp of approval.

10)And finally from Matthew Dowd: if a sitting President running for re-election attains a job approval of over 51% with Gallup going into the fall campaign (Sept 2012) no one has failed to win re-election while if an incumbent is polling less than 47% in job approval after the conventions then no one has won re-election. And therefore anywhere between 47%-51% becomes no man's land for Obama if that is where he finds himself in 2012 and also the only time the qualifications of the GOP nominee matter.

People venture all the time that polls this far out don't matter. I would disagree. Obama is in deep, deep trouble right now, slowly sinking into the abyss and without any measurement of that we would not know how badly he was doing and conversely how much of an opportunity that the GOP nominee will have probably in 2012 to take him down.

But the key word is "opportunity". Nothing is etched in stone and yes the political lay of the land could change in the next two years.

"Why is there not more focus on the viability of Mitt Romney? ""

techno, we are aware of your burning love for RomneyCARE and Mitt the Carpetbagging Backstabber.

Why?

MITT ROMNEY - THE PROVEN BAD GOVERNOR

"As U.S. real output grew 13 percent between 2002 and 2006, Massachusetts trailed at 9 percent.
* Manufacturing employment fell 7 percent nationwide those years, but sank 14 percent under Romney, placing Massachusetts 48th among the states.
* Between fall 2003 and autumn 2006, U.S. job growth averaged 5.4 percent, nearly three times Massachusetts' anemic 1.9 percent pace.
* While 8 million Americans over age 16 found work between 2002 and 2006, the number of employed Massachusetts residents actually declined by 8,500 during those years.
"Massachusetts was the only state to have failed to post any gain in its pool of employed residents," professors Sum and McLaughlin concluded.
In an April 2003 meeting with the Massachusetts congressional delegation in Washington, Romney failed to endorse President Bush's $726 billion tax-cut proposal."
[Cato Institute annual Fiscal Policy Report Card - America's Governors, 2004.]

“The Massachusetts Republican Party died last Tuesday.
The cause of death: failed leadership.
The party is survived by a few leftover legislators
and a handful of county officials and grassroots activists
who have been ignored for years.
Services will be public and a mass exodus of taxpayers will follow.
In lieu of flowers, send messages to Republican voters
warning them about a certain presidential candidate named Romney.”
- Boston Herald, 11/12/2006

"In 2006, while Romney was chairman of the National Republican
Governors Association - a group dedicated to electing more
Republican governors - his own hand-picked Republican successor
as governor lost badly to the Democrat, despite the fact that Republicans
have held the governorship in Massachusetts since 1990. Romney largely
ignored the Massachusetts elections and spent most of the time
during the campaign out of state building his presidential campaign.
He came back and publicly campaigned for the Republican candidate
the day before the general election!
“Locally, this is a rebuke to Mitt Romney and checking out within six months
after being elected and having accomplished almost nothing,”
[Jim] Rappaport [former chairman of the state Republican Party]."
- Boston Globe, 11/8/2006

"Governor Mitt Romney, who touts his conservative credentials to out-of-state Republicans,
has passed over GOP lawyers for three-quarters of the 36 judicial vacancies he has faced,
instead tapping registered Democrats or independents -- including two gay lawyers who
have supported expanded same-sex rights, a Globe review of the nominations has found.
Of the 36 people Romney named to be judges or clerk magistrates, 23 are either registered Democrats
or unenrolled voters who have made multiple contributions to Democratic politicians
or who voted in Democratic primaries, state and local records show.
In all, he has nominated nine registered Republicans, 13 unenrolled voters,
and 14 registered Democrats."
- Boston Globe 7/25/2005

Romney Rewards one of the State's Leading Anti-Marriage Attorneys by Making him a Judge
Romney told the U.S. Senate on June 22, 2004, that the "real threat to the States is not the
constitutional amendment process, in which the states participate,
but activist judges who disregard the law and redefine marriage . . ."
Romney sounds tough but yet he had no qualms advancing the legal career of one
of the leading anti-marriage attorneys. He nominated Stephen Abany to a District Court.
Abany has been a key player in the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association which,
in its own words, is "dedicated to ensuring that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision
on marriage equality is upheld, and that any anti-gay amendment or legislation is defeated."
- U.S. Senate testimony by Gov. Mitt Romney, 6/22/2004 P>

"Romney announces he won't fill judicial vacancies before term ends
Despite his rhetoric about judicial activism, Romney announced that
he won't fill all the remaining vacancies during his term - but instead
leave them for his liberal Democrat successor!
Governor Mitt Romney pledged yesterday not to make a flurry of lame-duck
judicial appointments in the final days of his administration . . . David Yas,
editor of Lawyers Weekly, said Romney is "bucking tradition" by resisting the urge to
fill all remaining judgeships. "It is a tradition for governors to use that power to appoint judges
aggressively in the waning moments of their administration," Yas said.
He added that Romney has been criticized for failing to make judicial appointments.
"The legal community has consistently criticized him for not filling open seats quickly enough
and being a little too painstaking in the process and being dismissive of the input of the
Judicial Nominating Commission," Yas said.
- Boston Globe 11/2/2006

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